The highly rated CBS sitcom The Big Bang Theory compensates for its lack of refinement (it has a laugh track!) with its brains. The show began with characters who were more like caricatures of four types of physical scientists: the theoretical physicist (Sheldon Cooper), the experimental physicist (Leonard Hofstadter), the astrophysicist (Raj Koothrappali), and the aerospace engineer [...]
Marilynne Robinson Thanks to Carl Eric Scott for calling attention to the strengths and weaknesses of the moral, political, scientific, and theological views of Marilynne Robinson (perhaps our best living novelist) by highlighting Paul Seaton’s balanced and smart review of her latest book of essays. Ms. Robinson’s thought really is neo-Puritanical. Mr. Seaton and Mr. Scott, knowing, as they do, [...]
The only “practical” panel I went to at the APSA [the American Political Science Association meeting] was one on the future of the Republican party. Carl Scott has already talked about it a bit. It really was true that our friend Yuval Levin was the only participant who addressed the actual issues in a reasonable and engaging [...]
I appreciate John McGinnis’s account of the state of our liberty. He’s right that by some objective measures liberty is on the decline. But, a consistent individualist might say, liberty is on the march when it comes to same-sex marriage, legalized marijuana, and the general front of “lifestyle liberty.” On this front, as the consistent [...]
A plausible interpretation of America and the world at the moment is that the imperatives of the 21st century global marketplace are so powerful they trump anything religious and political leaders say or do. Techno-economic change does not, to be sure, trump anything and everything that nature might do. We recently had the near-miss of [...]
Since the election in 2008 of Barack Obama, a self-proclaimed “Progressive,” many American conservative intellectuals have become convinced that resistance to Progressivism is the essence of their cause. They believe the American political tradition, flowing from the philosopher John Locke, is grounded in the immutable “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God”—and preeminently in the [...]
From a certain view, the most probing question Alexis de Tocqueville had to answer in Democracy in America is “Why are the Americans so restless in the midst of prosperity?” Why can’t they just stop and enjoy all their good fortune? Why are those workaholics almost running away from leisure? Why do those pursuers of [...]
Libertarian futurists such as Tyler Cowen and Brink Lindsey sometimes write as if the point of all our remarkable techno-progress—the victory of capitalism in the form of the creative power of “human capital”—is some combination of the emancipatory hippie spirit of the 1960s with the liberty in the service of individual productivity of Reagan’s 1980s. [...]
Ross Douthat has written on the revival of Marxism as a seductive theory in the wake of burgeoning economic inequality and the withering away of the middle class. He might have said that the futurist most attuned to both those trends is the savvy libertarian economist Tyler Cowen in his Average Is Over. Cowen says, [...]
Richard V. Reeves has written in The Atlantic a confident and illuminating account of the state of marriage in America today. College-educated American men and women “are reinventing marriage as a child-rearing machine for a post-feminist society and a knowledge economy.” On this front, the Americans have once again shown their superiority to the Europeans, who, in their [...]
Years ago, I went twice to the snake-handling Church of the Lord Jesus Christ in Kingston, Georgia—about twenty miles from where I live. It wasn’t my unbounded personal curiosity that led me to that church the first time. I went with a group of Christian sociologists who were meeting at Berry College, where I teach. [...]
Her is quite the meticulous and creepily seductive criticism of our techno-orientation toward transhumanism. It is the dystopian film of our time, a haunting glimpse at the near future. The transhumanist theory is that, when you strip away the illusions, we’re all basically operating systems. We’re, as Descartes first explained, conscious machines. A problem, though, is that our bodies [...]
One reason to have a liberal education—one that’s usually neglected by all those experts these days who are saying that the value of an education is measured by the money you earn after graduation—is that it’s indispensable for understanding the political teachings of the better summer blockbuster movies, such as the very thoughtful new Superman [...]
To begin with a simple point, one basic insight of Tocqueville is that things are always getting better and worse. Thus, it is hardly surprising that Tocqueville could be used to defend the advantages of religious establishment. He, more generally, is unrivaled in arousing a kind of selective nostalgia that helps us remember the advantages [...]